1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an apparatus for generating a job network flow from job control statements described in a job control language, its method and program.
2. Description of the Related Art
Recently there has been a blossoming of system migration from Mainframe to Open-system using UNIX® server or universal OS such as Windows® in many enterprises.
In such system migration, handling of job assets that have been managed on the Mainframe is an important issue.
Such job assets are typically described in a job control language (JCL). However, the JCL is not available on the Open-system, so that it is necessary to convert the JCL into a language such as UNIX® shell script and to substitute a JCL command with a job network flow.
In general, the conversion from the JCL into job network is manually performed by system engineers and the like.
However, considerable man-hours are required to manually converting several thousands of JCL files into the job network. Further, a great number of bugs may occur through manual labour, involving tests for detecting the bugs, with the result that migration cost becomes extremely high.
[Patent Document 1] JP-A-11-024913
The first problem is that the manual migration work from the JCL to job network suffers from human-induced errors which lead to quality degradation and consume considerable cost due to a test work performed for restoring the quality degradation.
The second problem is as follows. Originally, there are various dependencies between the JCL files. More specifically, for example, execution of one JCL file must be completed in order to start execution of another JCL file. In an environment where there exist, e.g., several thousands of the JCL files, a few engineers grasp the existence of such dependencies or the contents of the dependencies. Therefore, considerable cost is incurred in order to investigate the dependencies. This adds further cost and risk to the migration work.
Further, even if a simple conversion tool is created and used, a large number of errors may occur due to existence of dependencies in the actual test time and, in the end, the cause of errors must be investigated and corrected though manual labour. As a result, a cost reduction effect cannot be achieved.